Tokenmaxxing might have quite the backfire potential.
Alex Karp, CEO of well-known AI data analytics company Palantir, delivered quite the bombshell of an interview to CNBC's Squawk Box. Although the interview's topic was about the firm's partnership with Nvidia, apropos the recently launched Sovereign AI OS Architecture, Karp bluntly claimed that frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic siphon customers' valuable information while delivering questionable value.
He continued by stating that American enterprises are quietly "livid," as "they are paying for tokens that create no value," and that the AI players "are stealing [their customers'] weights and alpha." The latter items refer to customers' business processes and interconnections between their data, along with the data itself. Palantir's shares jumped about 9% the day of the interview, while those of other AI companies experienced a dip.
Palantir's CEO just exposed Sam Altman and Dario Amodei for robbing every Fortune 500 company.Within two minutes, Alex Karp took the entire frontier AI industry apart on national television.His exact words: "Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID.… pic.twitter.com/132b5s6dQGJuly 1, 2026
For context, many of Palantir's products are on-premises solutions or a variation thereof, and they carry a truckload of certifications like the DOD-required CMMC Level 2 or ISO27001/17/18. Karp's business also alleges that it does not train any models and merely utilizes other entities', without retraining them with customer data. Instead, the company's particular approach is coined "ontology" and, as a simplification, focuses on business data classification, entity definitions, and behavior.
Improving the training of an LLM requires an influx of new and improved information, which is why Karp claims that frontier labs are double-dipping by both selling customers LLM utilization all while using their data for improving said LLMs — in other words, the risk for a customer is that they're arguably teaching the bots' abilities and information that could get their business easily replicated and potentially replaced.
He puts the value of a token in question by using an old business analogy: if the frontier players supposedly generate so much value for their customers, why don't they treat it as an investment and charge a percentage of said value? Not too long ago, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar shared the same view in an equally abrasive manner: "more tokens means more slop," questioning the productivity gains of the "tokenmaxxing" fad that tech leaders like Nvidia's Jensen Huang have promoted.
Karp is likewise not too keen on the promises that frontier companies make about data harvesting, calling Silicon Valley's general attitude of "you can trust me because I never lied" straight-up "B.S." He further notes that enterprises want to know who owns the data, where it is cached, and whether the prompts are secure, while also taking a dim view of services that then rely on third parties, as those might not be bound by the same contractual obligations. Furthermore, he described the notion of the Silicon Valley zeitgeist applying its views to defense-related information as effing insane [sic].
A portion of the world has a dim view of Palantir's defense-related business ethics, something that Karp acknowledges, all while displaying at least some self-awareness that Silicon Valley leadership arguably lacks. He plainly states that he too profits from the aforementioned practices, though there's little doubt his talking points serve the interest of selling on-premises services.
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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
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ezst036 I believe him.Reply
There is a mass amount of money that companies are making through data theft in a violation of our private property rights. AI companies, Google, and many more.
We are the product.
It is grotesque -
Michael Pun haha Alex Carp trying to play the role of hero. He probably help them facilitate this. He's part of the club tooReply